Military drones have had an interesting effect on storytelling: They have forced writers to rethink how they portray warfare. For how do you represent invisible weapons? How do you tell of battles where combatants never face each other and death comes out of nowhere in seconds? Movies such as “Eye in the Sky” and “Good Kill” have looked at the price exacted by drones on those who remote-control them, an approach also adopted by the 2015 solo play “Grounded,” in which Anne Hathaway portrayed a pilot now dropping hellfire while sitting thousands of miles away from her targets.
Sylvia Khoury’s earnest new drama, “Against the Hillside,” looks at the effect of drones both on those who guide them and those who endure them. The show toggles between Pakistan, where the married Sayid (Babak Tafti) and Reem (Mahira Kakkar, “When January Feels Like Summer”) are constantly “listening to the sky,” and America, where one Capt. Matt Walker (Jack Mikesell) is doing the watching. Both parties live in anxiety, though of course the stakes are quite different — it’s in Pakistan that a corpse’s limbs, torn by a sudden strike, have to be recovered for a proper burial.
Matt, a pilot who took the drone job when he and his wife, Erin (Caroline Hewitt), decided to start a family, is becoming way too “invested,” as he puts it, in the Pakistani couple’s life. He is particularly fascinated by Reem, and feels as if he knows her. That’s a mistake, of course. First, he doesn’t have access to her inner life, and second, there’s a reason farmers don’t name the animals they’re raising for slaughter — being invested in your victims is a bad idea.